SURFSIDE, Fla. — Raysa Rodriguez, a retired postal worker, lived in Unit 907 of Champlain Towers South for 17 years. She was a few payments away from paying off her mortgage.
But the dream retirement ended in the middle of the night, when a giant rumble shook her from her sleep. The building, Rodriguez wrote in a dramatic first-person account included in a newly filed lawsuit, “swayed like a piece of paper.”
She switched on the bedroom lamp — but there was no power. She ran to the balcony “and a wall of dust hit me.”
Phone calls to the her neighbor, and her brother, went unanswered. Rodriguez ran into the hallway. “I looked left to the north end of the building. A concrete column had pierced the hallway from floor to ceiling. I looked at the elevators. The elevator shafts were exposed, the doors were gone,” Rodriguez wrote.
When she sprinted to the stairwell exit, Rodriguez opened the door and saw a scene out of an apocalypse movie. “The beach side of Champlain had collapsed, pancaked,” she wrote. “I screamed in horror.”
The narrative is included in a lawsuit filed this week against the Champlain Towers South Condo Association, the third such lawsuit filed in Miami-Dade circuit court since the building collapsed early Thursday morning. The collapse, which could become one of the deadliest building failures in American history, has sparked a massive search for survivors and sprawling investigation into the catastrophic building failure.
Eleven people have died, and 150 people remain unaccounted for.
Like the other lawsuits, Rodriguez’s lawyers contend that the condo association engaged in “reckless and negligent conduct” by ignoring long-needed repairs to the building. The class-action suits ask that similar lawsuits be consolidated, and that evidence be preserved to “determine everyone who is to blame for this tragedy and all of them be held responsible.”
Six engineering experts have also told the Herald that from earlier reviews of photos, videos, engineering reports and a witness account, the collapse may have originated from a structural column or concrete slab beneath the pool deck. On Monday, a pool contractor told the Miami Herald that 36 hours before the collapse, he saw alarming pools of standing water in the basement-level garage, as well as cracking concrete and severely corroded rebar under the swimming pool.
Adam Schwartzbaum, Rodriguez’s lawyer, grew up in the building — his grandparents lived there. He said his family complained about water intrusion in the parking garage, and the building was sued over it back in 2003.
“We’re talking 15-20 years ago,” Schwartzbaum said Tuesday. “This is a problem that’s been in the building for decades.”
The tragedy will now be the subject of a complex state and federal investigation, and it could take months, if not years, to determine what caused the collapse. Miami-Dade State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle told the Herald on Monday that she will ask a grand jury to investigate the collapse and concerns about building safety.
In the lawsuit, Rodriguez said she heard a voice from the rubble. “Please help me! Please help me! Don’t leave me here!” It was dark and Rodriguez could not see who was pleading for help.
She ran back to her condo, got dressed and suddenly someone pounded on her door. It was her next-door neighbor, Yadira, with her 10-year-old son and their Maltese puppy. They went out to the balcony because Rodriguez believed the stairs were gone.
But then her brother, Fred, called and urged her to leave. The stairwell was intact. The group inched down the stairwell, but not before stopping at their friend’s home in Unit 808, she wrote.
They helped the neighbor, a woman in her 80s named Ada, down the stairs with her walker. “We slowly navigated the steps downward trying to be as gentle as possible,” she wrote.
The small group finally reached the first-floor exit at the pool area, but the door was blocked by rubble. “I pushed but couldn’t move it,” she wrote. “It was dark and I could hear water flooding into the garage. I knew being electrocuted was a possibility.”
Blocked, they climbed up to the second story and entered a friend’s apartment. They tried going onto the balcony, but the sliding-glass doors wouldn’t open.
“We were rattled and couldn’t maneuver the locks. The door finally opened. We exited to the balcony,” she wrote.
Their saviors were there. Fire-rescue workers helped them down with a ladder. “Raysa and her neighbors were four of the more fortunate victims of the Champlain Towers South collapse,” the lawsuit said.
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(Miami Herald staff writer Charles Rabin contributed to this report.)
